Netflix Movies On Streaming That Are Actually Good: 7 Tools To Help You Find Them

PASADENA, CA - JANUARY 09: Interior view during the Netflix portion of the 2013 Winter Television Critics Association Press Tour at the Langham Hotel and Spa on January 9, 2013 in Pasadena, California. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

On these long, cold days of winter -- and with the menacing Nemo headed for the East Coast -- many of you are probably planning on curling up with a loved one and a laptop to watch a movie or two on Netflix's streaming section. But once you cycle through the classics -- "Office Space," "Oldboy," the first two seasons of "Arrested Development" -- you might find yourself desperately searching for another Instant movie or television show to make your frigid, bed-ridden hours pass by just a little bit more quickly.

If Netflix's recommendations are getting stale, I've collected seven websites you can visit to find some fresh inspiration and flicks you otherwise might not have have found on the service. Because, really, how many times can you re-watch "Breakfast at Tiffany's" before you're ready for something new?

1. A Better Queue

A new website called A Better Queue has turned heads with a gorgeous, clean design and intuitive interface that makes finding new Netflix options a joy. The site is simple and brilliant: It combines the Netflix Instant library with Rotten Tomatoes ratings, so that you can sort movies based on their Tomatometer score. (The higher the score, the better the ratio of professional reviewers who liked the movie). You can set filters based on movie genre, minimum Rotten Tomatoes score and year of the movie's release, and A Better Queue will display your results in a Pinterest-like pinboard grid.

Speaking of RottenTomatoes: Did you know the venerable critical aggregator has its own section devoted to helping you find movies to watch on Netflix? Though not as pretty as A Better Queue, RottenTomatoes can sort streaming Netflix movies based on Tomatometer score, release date, genre and MPAA rating; you can also search within RottenTomatoes by actor or director. From your results, you can either add a movie to your Instant Queue or play it immediately, with RottenTomatoes linking you straight out to the Netflix site.

The Holy Grail of Netflix sites is probably InstantWatcher. It's got an encyclopedia's worth of information about movies streaming on the 'Flix: new movies, the most popular movies, movies that are expiring soon (get on it!), New York Times critics' picks, as well as filtering via genre, RottenTomatoes or Netflix rating, MPAA rating and more.

Another simple, well-made website that brings a lot of sorting options to your search for the perfect Netflix streamer. You can filter by genre, rating or Netflix star count; or you can head into the excellent Lists section, which shows you Netflix Instant movies that made various critical countdowns, including AFI's 100 Best Movies and Roger Ebert's Movies You Must See Before You Die.

If you're looking for an external Netflix utility that'll make your eyeballs pop out of your head, try the neat-o Pivot View of Netflix Instant Titles. It offers a huge grid of movie posters (which can be filtered by genre, rating, cast member, director and more) that you can flip through and drag around in almost any direction. Zoom in, zoom out, maybe find a new TV series to binge-watch.

It's not the most efficient way to find your next title, but Pivot View sure does look cool. You can try it here.

6. WhichFlicks

WhichFlicks is another cool, grid-based website to sort your Netflix recommendations. Again, you can filter by rating, genre, cast members and RottenTomatoes or Netflix scores, and you can also add iTunes, Redbox or Amazon filters, if you're willing to search outside the 'Flix.

A specialty site, Streaming Soon mainly exists to let you know which notable titles will be arriving to Netflix in the coming weeks or months, as well as which streams have just been added. It also has a (great!) section of the most highly-rated titles currently streaming on the service.

You can't rank or organize or filter anything on StreamingSoon, but you can see an automatically-updating list of the highly-regarded movies on Netflix. Treat yourself to some cinema!

Netflix Movies On Streaming That Are Actually Good: 7 Tools To Help You Find Them

Netflix Tips And Tricks

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Don't Watch A Movie Without Rating It

When you finish a show or movie on Netflix, the site requests that you give it between one and five stars, based on how much you enjoyed it. You're not being asked to rate that content for kicks, or so that you can later reminisce about how much you liked a certain film: Rather, Netflix has spent many years improving its recommendation engine, even offering a $1 million prize for anyone who could up the accuracy of Netflix recommendations by 10 percent.
At this point, the Netflix recommendation engine is pretty darn accurate -- it takes into account your own ratings as well as the viewing habits of those similar to you. Basically, the more films you rate, the more you're likely to enjoy a Netflix recommendation. If you constantly find yourself frustrated that there's nothing on Netflix, take a half hour or so and knock out a few hundred ratings on the "Taste Profile" section of the site, and make sure you've filled in your genre preferences, too.
Finally, if Netflix persists in recommending a title that you're just never going to watch -- for me, that would be "The Lincoln Lawyer" -- remember that you can click on the "Not Interested" button on any film's homepage and it will disappear from your recommendations page while simultaneously smartening up your future recs.
(For an in-depth look at the Netflix recommendation engine, and how it works, I recommend this post on Netflix's official blog.)